Beau Hebert realized almost immediately upon stepping into the Bollier family’s kitchen that glitter was going to be his ultimate downfall.

Yes, glitter. The sparkly, seemingly innocent substance that people used to decorate things like arts and crafts projects, homemade Christmas and Valentine’s Day cards, and, apparently, New Year’s Eve decorations.

He’d spent the past two months believing it was pumpkin spice lattes that were going to be his undoing.

But no, it was definitely going to be glitter.

Glitter. And his next-door neighbor, Becca Bollier.

The girl who had moved in next door when they’d been ten. And had been the first person to tell him he was an asshole. And the first—and only—girl to punch him.

Both of those things had happened when they’d been ten too. Well, the first time.

Ironically, if there really was such a thing as having a devil and an angel sitting on his shoulders, giving him bad and good advice, Becca would have been the angel. She’d smoothed out his rough spots and kept him from becoming, mostly, an even bigger asshole.

Thank God—yeah, he knew that was ironic too—Becca hadn’t gotten gorgeous until she’d been eighteen and on her way out of town to college.

She’d gotten pretty at about aged fifteen; she’d gotten beautiful around sixteen-and-a-half—not that he’d been keeping track—but gorgeous hadn’t happened until the summer they were eighteen.

And she hadn’t turned into a woman who he couldn’t be within ten feet of without wanting to run his hand through her hair and over the sweet curve of her ass until… well, about October twenty-seventh of this year.

Okay, exactly October twenty-seventh of this year.

When she’d been—ironically—dressed in a satiny red devil’s costume that hugged her breasts and barely covered that sweet ass and had matching thigh-high red leather boots.

She’d walked into the kitchen in that thing, and he’d swallowed the bite of pumpkin muffin down the wrong pipe, shoved back from the table to try to keep from choking to death, and then spilled his pumpkin spice latte down the front of him and into his lap. And onto his sudden and extremely inconvenient erection.

He’d never drank a pumpkin spice latte before that day.

Or since.

But now, the smell of cinnamon, or pumpkin, or the sight of whipped cream, made him hard.

Which had also been very inconvenient considering that had happened five days before Halloween, and between October twenty-seventh and today, December twenty-seventh, there had been a lot of pumpkin, cinnamon, and whipped cream around.